Washington Does Damage Control on Ukraine War Leaks

The Biden administration and Ukrainian officials have jumped into damage control mode after they became aware late last week that a large cache of alleged secret U.S. military documents revealing granular details of Ukraine’s dwindling supplies and troop dispositions had been leaked, raising fears of a possible rupture in trust between Washington and Kyiv and other U.S. allies more than a year into Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

The leaks, which include alleged classified documents on the war in Ukraine as well as internal deliberations among Israel’s spy services during the country’s political crisis, sent shockwaves across Washington’s national security establishment and among U.S. allies abroad. Experts and officials said the leaks highlight vulnerabilities in the United States’ ability to keep classified information under wraps while also pointing to both Russian and Ukrainian shortfalls in the ongoing war. 

Foreign Policy has been unable to independently verify the veracity of the leaked documents, though top U.S. officials are taking the leaks seriously and have launched wide-ranging investigations. The U.S. Defense Department said late Sunday that it was still reviewing and assessing the classified documents, which began to surface on encrypted Discord servers in March, and the U.S. Justice Department has taken the lead in investigating the disclosure. Among the leaks are documents seemingly prepared by the Joint Chiefs of Staff that detail in particular critical shortages of Soviet-era and Russian-made air defense ammunition in Ukrainian inventories and the depletion of some of Ukraine’s most powerful units after months of grinding attritional warfare around Bakhmut, in eastern Ukraine. 

“The Department of Defense continues to review and assess the validity of the photographed documents that are circulating on social media sites and that appear to contain sensitive and highly classified material,” Sabrina Singh, the Pentagon’s deputy press secretary, said in an emailed statement on Sunday. “An interagency effort has been stood up, focused on assessing the impact these photographed documents could have on U.S. national security and on our allies and partners.” 

U.S. officials are still trying to figure out the size and scope of the leaks, said Chris Meagher, the assistant to the defense secretary for public affairs. U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was first briefed on the disclosure on Thursday and began convening daily meetings of senior Pentagon officials about the issue on Friday.

Experts have described the leaks as potentially the most damaging U.S. national security disclosure since Edward Snowden passed along highly classified documents revealing National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance programs nearly a decade ago. They appear to provide details on U.S. efforts to train Ukrainian forces and the rates of fire for U.S.-provided systems, such as NATO-standard 155 mm artillery systems and the precision-guided High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, known as HIMARS, that Kyiv used to enormous effect against Russian lines in the summer and fall of 2022. 

Former European officials believe that the leaks aren’t likely to immediately influence Ukraine’s military planning, including a much-awaited upcoming spring offensive by Ukrainian forces after months of virtual stalemate. 

“It might influence some Ukrainian military perspectives but not very much,” said Artis Pabriks, who was Latvia’s defense minister until December and now heads up the Northern Europe Policy Centre, a think tank based in Riga. “At the end, there is a certain logic in offensive and defensive war, and I think there is a possibility to calculate more or less what might happen.” 

While it wasn’t immediately clear who was responsible for the leaks, images from the cache shared on Russian-language Telegram channels appeared to be doctored to show outsized numbers of casualties among Ukrainian forces while greatly minimizing Russian losses. Though it was not clear how the documents made it onto the public internet, much of the photographed cache appeared to have been printed out and folded. 

“It’s not like they got war plans, you know?” said Jim Townsend, a former U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense for Europe and NATO. “They got statistics based on the situation back in February. Those may still be good, and they may not be. If it spurs the administration to provide more air defense, both systems as well as missiles, then that’s great.” 

The Biden administration spent the first two months of 2023 trying to speed deliveries of major weapons systems to Ukraine, including Abrams tanks and Patriot missile defense systems pledged to Kyiv by the United States. The first cohort of Ukrainian troops finished training on the Patriot system late last month, and the battery is expected to arrive soon to help relieve Ukraine’s beleaguered air defenses. But with U.S. stockpiles dwindling, much of the military aid that the United States announced for Ukraine last week in a $2.6 billion package, including more ammo for the Patriot and HIMARS systems, will need to be built by U.S. defense contractors before it can be sent overseas. 

By Monday, the Ukrainian government was moving to downplay and discredit the leaks. Mykhailo Podolyak, a top advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, said the documents are “based on a large amount of fictitious information” and had nothing to do with Ukraine’s real military plans. The U.S. military has been helping Ukrainian officials plot war games for the upcoming spring counteroffensive at a U.S. base in Wiesbaden, Germany. 

“Yeah, new brigades are being prepared—what is the secret?” Oleksiy Goncharenko, a Ukrainian lawmaker, said in a phone interview. “What from this did the Russians not possibly know before the leaks? Nothing.” Goncharenko said the leaks had mostly faded from view in conversations in Ukraine’s parliament, the Verkhovna Rada. “Inside the country, no one is really speaking about this,” he added. “It’s not discussed in the parliament.” 

Still, the leaks could erode U.S. allies’ confidence in Washington’s ability to keep secrets. The national security community is still smarting from the fallout of the massive SolarWinds cyberattack in 2020, in which Russian hackers infiltrated the networks of heavily fortified federal agencies’ computer systems. And the documents hint at U.S. efforts to eavesdrop on top Ukrainian officials, perhaps eroding trust between Washington and Kyiv.

“[I]t tells adversaries what we think we know, and it may also tell them how we know it,” said Mick Mulroy, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense during the Trump administration and a onetime CIA paramilitary officer. “That could end up with our human sources being captured and killed. It tells our allies that we may be collecting information on them. Something that could cause significant diplomatic problems.”

That follows the 2015 hack of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management by suspected Chinese actors, considered at the time the largest breach of U.S. government data; Snowden’s NSA leaks; and the WikiLeaks release of hundreds of thousands of classified U.S. military and diplomatic documents in 2010.

The latest leaks will likely mean that “U.S. allies are going to share less” with Washington, said Brett Bruen, a former U.S. diplomat and National Security Council official. “We have shown ourselves again and again to be unreliable in the protection of some important sensitive intelligence.”

The leaked documents, and doctored versions spreading across Russian social media channels, also shed new light on the scale of Russian losses in the war—one of the only possible silver linings for Washington and its allies in an otherwise devastating counterintelligence failure.

“Whereas we might think the Kremlin should be exalting in the opportunities to identify and neutralize the evident vulnerabilities these documents expose, revelations depicting Russia’s failures, weaknesses, and horrific losses undermine Putin’s narrative of strength, control, and military success for his public as well as his foreign adversaries,” said Douglas London, a former CIA senior operations officer.

“While the Kremlin will aim to use the leaks to sow divisions among U.S. allies, the realities of Russian losses and incompetence are perhaps just as damaging for the Russian leader as they are for the U.S.,” he added.